Bank on It | How the internet killed creativity

Our generation has grown up with technology. We have personally witnessed the transition from wall phones to cordless phones to cell phones. We have watched TVs go from “normal” to high definition and on to 3D. We have become so accustomed to technology, it is scary to think what we would do if we lost it.

There are many reasons why technology is a great thing. It has simplified our lives in a multitude of ways, but one resource in particular affects students — the computer.

As college students, we are practically attached to our laptops. Unfortunately, we have become victims to our own technology.

Some of the most glaring problems are obvious to us. Spell check has killed any chance we ever had to win a spelling bee. Our ability to communicate with other people has pretty much gone down the drain, trading conversations and actual feelings for emails and emoticons.

However, the internet presents an entirely new problem for students.

As term papers are assigned throughout the semester, our computer skills must be at their pinnacle. We can find books and articles all online, cite them, write the paper and turn it in all from the comfort of our own couches.

Nicholas Carr, a writer at The Atlantic magazine who has researched this topic extensively, found that students “‘power browse’ horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.”

Carr described the change of style by saying, “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

Our power browsing usually follows the same pathway. First we Google our topic. Then, we click on the first link, which is almost always Wikipedia. After reading Wikipedia, we are more or less instant experts on the subject, and the rest is just filling in the blanks.

Our papers are written, but where is the value of the assignment? What have we gained from it?

Something that we may not think about when we take that route in writing our papers is how the internet is actually hurting the process of learning. When we search for our topics we are led to the most popular sites, and the more times we click on those pages, the more popular they become. This essentially funnels everyone in the same direction, effectively killing our creativity.

Initially, we may have thought that the internet would allow us to compile the resources in a single place, allowing us to research more completely because we would have much more information at our fingertips. Unfortunately, we are all instead directed to the same web pages, and all 200 of us in the class are turning in the same papers in the end.

So in a world where technology is always improving and making our lives easier, how can we help ourselves get more out of our education?

One way would be if our professors insisted that we use actual books and other print materials for our research.

James Evans, an assistant professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago who has studied the effect of technology on researchers, suggested in an article in the journal Science that “the forced browsing of print archives may have stretched scientists and scholars to anchor findings deeply into past and present scholarship.”

Yes, it would be a pain to have to spend time in the library, but we may actually end up with creative ideas instead of turning in the same papers as everyone else.

This problem is one lacking an easy solution because the internet is truly a great resource. But if we continue down this track, we will keep being funneled in the same unimaginative direction.

Sarah Banks is a College sophomore from Okemos, Mich. Her email address is banks@theDP.com. Bank on It appears every other Monday.

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